Three Poems:
"Dual"
"Gloss on a Text by Plutarch"
"Homer"
by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
translated from the Portugese
by Alexis Levitin
Northwest Review
Volume 43, Number 2 / 2005

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen:

Portugal's leading woman-of-letters, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was born on November 6, 1919 in Porto and died on July 2, 2004 in Lisbon. Early on, childhood summers by the sea flowed into her veins and marked her life. Before her teens, she began to read Homer and encountered there the same sea she already loved. Later, at the University, she naturally studied Classics. For the rest of her life the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Portugal and Greece, vied for her love and appeared, side by side, jostling like twins, throughout her poetry. For her, the sea was a kind of god-mother, teacher, muse. In The Conch Shell of Cos, she gratefully records her debt. For example, she credits her love for the beauty of form to "Watching without end the successive/ Swelling and breaking of the waves." In another poem she refers to "The meticulous beauty of the real/ Wave after wave." In fact, for this poet, the endless breaking of the waves as they come rolling in was the nurturing source of her poetic rhythm and poetic life. And the clarity of the blue-green sea was a model for the limpidness of her own language and imagery. Even the titles of her books makes this affinity clear: Dia do Mar (Day of the Sea, 1947), Coral (Coral, 1950), Mar Novo (New Sea, 1958), a children's book, A Menina do Mar (The Girl of the Sea, 1958); (Navigations, 1983), Ilhas (Islands, 1989), and finally the anthology Mar (Sea, 2001).
— Introduction by Alexis Levitin

Alexis Levitin:

Alexis Levitin is a prolific translator, and frequent contributor. The Selected Poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen will eventually be published by Guernica Editions.

About Northwest Review:

Northwest Review is the University of Oregon's tri-annual journal of literature, the arts and culture. It is among the nation's oldest and most esteemed literary reviews, and the only such publication in the Oregon State System of Higher Education. With subscribers in fifty states and thirty-seven foreign countries, Northwest Review has been widely circulated and celebrated for over forty years, making known the vitality of the University of Oregon, and garnering every major award given to magazines of its kind, from the National Endowment, to the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts, to the Eugene Arts and Letters Award.

"The Northwest Review has a long and distinguished reputation in national letters. Wherever one goes among writers and readers of fine literature, one hears the name of this magazine. It has published and encouraged many of our finest writers, and has done so often when they were beginners. Because of this the magazine has continued to be, quietly and crucially, one of the voices of human freedom and hope."
— Dave Smith

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